Radical Humanism by Beshara, Robert K.;

Short description:

Radical Humanism uses concepts from Marxism, anarchism, critical theory, psychoanalysis, and African, Asian, and Latin American philosophies to critique bourgeois, liberal, and Eurocentric humanism(s) from the perspectives of Indigenous studies, Black studies, and postcolonial/decolonial studies. 

Long description:

Radical Humanism uses concepts from Marxism, anarchism, critical theory, psychoanalysis, and African, Asian, and Latin American philosophies to critique bourgeois, liberal, and Eurocentric humanism(s) from the perspectives of Indigenous studies, Black studies, and postcolonial/decolonial studies.

The book problematizes and expands the Euromodern conception of the “human” to document and develop critical epistemologies, ontologies, and methodologies that honor the complexities of humans around the world. It takes a particular focus on those who have historically been excluded from the category of “human,” including Indigenous, Black, and Global Southern humans. Contributors critically engage with humanism from a pluriversal perspective, honoring non- European ways of knowing and being, while providing a dialoguebetween multiple voices and viewpoints.

The book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students interested in decolonizing perspectives in psychology, the humanities, and social sciences.

"Radical Humanism brings together philosophers, film makers, and psychologists for what is arguably the most important political conversation today: the future of what it means to be human on a shared planet. Like the light in New Mexico where this book was forged, Beshara’s collection inspires its readers to place themselves amidst a sometimes bright, sometimes shadow-crossed, always shifting world."

Benjamin P. Davis, author of Another Humanity: Decolonial Ethics from Du Bois to Arendt

"Radical Humanism: Decolonizing Perspectives in Critical Psychology is a daring, necessary reckoning with the limits of the human as we have inherited it, centering the weird, the pluriversal, and the historically dispossessed as the grounds for reimagining the human. Together, the contributors take up the challenge of imagining what it means to be human in the wake of coloniality, racial capitalism, and epistemic violence. What emerges is not a single definition of radical humanism but a set of commitments, fuelled by a shared refusal of racial capitalism, colonial violence, and epistemic erasure, and shaped by the imperative to think otherwise. Beshara opens with his own positionality to begin an urgent conversation across disciplines, traditions, and geopolitical locations that embraces contradiction and makes space for unknowing as an invitation to think otherwise. An important text for anyone invested in critical psychology, decolonial theory, and the always unfinished but ever important task of becoming human otherwise. An important text, a must read!"

Kamari Maxine Clarke, Ph.D., University of Toronto, Canada, author of Affective Justice 

Table of Contents:

1.     Robert K. Beshara ~ Radical Humanism Qua Weird Humanism

2.     Matthew Flisfeder ~ Communism or Humanism? Yes, Please: On Althusser, Mao, and the Development of the Superstructure

3.     Sarah Huxtable Mohr ~ Utopian Vision and Islamic Liberation Theory: Islamic Humanism and What Can Be or What Ought to Be

4.     Asma Mehan & Sina Mostafavi ~ Architectural Humanities: Decolonizing Perspectives in Mapping Resilience and Urban Psychology

5.     Elena Marquez ~ Humanism in the Making: Chicana Women and Creative Labor

6.     Nadine R. Jackson ~ To Inhale Is To Inherit: Structural Violence, Molecular Trauma, and the Necro-Biopolitical Matrix

7.     El Mehdi Ait Oukhzame ~ (Anti-)Blackness, Fugitive Positionality, and the Human Question

8.     Naomi Jacobi ~ From Species-Being to Interspecies-Becoming: Labor and the Formation of Transhuman Subjectivities

9.     Kieran Durkin ~ Human (Anti)Capital: Reinvigorating the Critique of Capital

10.  Sneha Chakradhar ~ Divinity and Humanism in Bharatanatyam 

11.  Scott Krzych ~ Sylvia Wynter, Deciphering Practices, and Cognitive Film Studies

12.  María Constanza Garrido Sierralta ~ The Memory of Others: A Critical Phenomenology of Detenidos-Desaparecidos

13.  David Lindblom ~ Iconic Catholic Imagery Hidden in Plain Sight in Bicycle Thieves

14.  Caveh Zahedi ~ A Map of the Human

15.  Lewis Gordon ~ Radical Humanism